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World Turned Upside Down

Okay, I’m Alliance. I can’t motivate you by screaming at you about Victory or Death. We like the softer, cuddlier side of life.

In the Alliance, we’re a kinder, gentler evil overlord imposing our will on a brave new world of savage foes and savager delights.

Best I can do is exhort you to fight fiercely in all your battles, and remind you that at the end of the day your Pleasure-Bot 8000 will be waiting at your Garrison to offer you a massage and a nice hot toddy with your favorite slippers.

I won’t judge why you went to so much trouble to acquire a Pleasure-Bot 8000. Don’t ask, don’t tell, right? Hey, what you do in the privacy of your own inn is your business.

I’m also not going to ask what all those followers are doing in the ‘private rooms’ in the back. As long as the management gets a cut, it’s all good. Do what feels right.

Setting the tone, check.

This expansion has turned the game upside down for me. Blizzard has succeeded with Warlords of Draenor. Indeed, they’ve succeeded all too well.

Here’s the bare truth. I am legitimately more excited to gear up and level my followers than I am to level up on my main.

Or to put it another way, questing is what I do on my main while I wait for my follower missions to be completed.

Also, questing using the Wowhead Follower Guide is what I do to seek out new followers, new locations of minions, to boldly go where new followers have never been found before. I love that guide. That guide is my Gulliver’s journal to adventure!

For the horde!

That’s horde with a little ‘H’, I am a hoarder of a horde, I want them all, must have ALL the minions, must expand my evil empire, must pursue higher follower iLevels…

What, the followers are supposed to exist to support my character’s activities in the game? You’re joking, right?

That is no longer the game I want to play. I want my character activities to support the actions of my MINIONS in the game. Everything I do, I do it for you. And you, and you and you.

And YOU get an armor enhancement, and YOU get an armor enhancement, and You and You and You!

I want to quest to find a nice comfy chair for my followers to sit on while resting in the Inn. Just before the Spanish Inquisition bursts in and asks them pointed questions in uncomfortable ways.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! And certainly nobody knows how to handle… the comfy chair.

I want to be able to research a new small building… the BEER GARDEN. With attached outdoor barbeque area, of course. A nice patio, dancing with my Disco ball at night, luau lamps and tiki torches and a party going on down here, it’s a celebration that lasts throughout the year.

Is that so wrong of me?

I’m telling you. This carrot dangling in front of me will keep me going for years. Content patches? Give me more building options, furniture and missions to send my followers on, oh my.

Right now we can have some followers as Bodyguards with the level 2+ Barracks, follow us around.

The existing followers have pre-determined mounts they use.

Why not open that up? Have any of the followers be able to be Bodyguards.

Or failing that, of the Followers that CAN be Bodyguards, let us quest for Follower mounts we can assign to them.

Follower Mounts… and visible armor transmog sets (not pieces, full sets, let’s not get too complicated). And weapons. And banner poles they can have flying our guild pennant behind them. Or our Garrison symbol! We have Guild logos, why not a symbol for our own Garrison? Our own mark of zorro to strike fear into the hearts of our foes, a heraldic escutcheon carried by our sworn men-at-arms to protect them from the fel fire and arrows of outrageous posers.

Can you imagine being able to have Tormmok assigned as your Bodyguard, and then assign him a sparkle pony, or better yet a big barrel-bellied pony as his mount? And he already has wicked cool armor, but to be able to assign him the Stormwind Guard armor transmog set from the Dwarven Bunker? And top it off with a big banner pole waving your Garrison symbol proudly behind him.

Have your own hulking mass of monstrous badass following you around looking like your Garrison Thug. Your homeland homie.

Your own persona Knuckledragger. Riding around on his tiny fat-bellied donkey following along behind you, as you gallop forth on your majestic rounds surveying your demesne and keeping the peons hopping to it in the fields.

Oh my.

Would I raid for new Followers? Yes, of course.

Would I raid equally as hard for loot upgrades that are worthless except for transmog as soon as the next content patch hits?

Errr. Do I have to answer that where my raid leader can see me?

Blizzard, you won with this expansion. Body and soul, the Garrison and my Followers have supplanted my own characters in what I’m loving to do.

The scary bit is I’m also loving the zones and the questing and the playing of my character. It’s all fantastic, the level of care and grand adventure that all the storylines I’ve played have evoked is magical.

It’s just that as good as the questing is, I love my Follower mini-game even more.

I can tell you this, even at the height of my rare pet battling and collecting obsession, I didn’t go more than two or three mornings waking up to sneak downstairs and see if a rare spawn had popped on a low-pop server.

With Garrisons? “Oh, it’s 4:30 AM, I don’t have to start getting ready for work for another half hour… plenty of time to gather resources, collect mission results and assign Followers to new tasks. Best be quiet, don’t want to wake Cassie.”

Yeah. Yeah, this is a thing.

And my Garrison is still level 2! I can only hope my enthusiasm wanes when I hit level 3 and expand.

Did I mention how excited I am that today I should have my third level 100 Follower and can start taking part in the level 100 missions for bonus rewards?

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10 thoughts on “World Turned Upside Down”

I still love the comment from Pleasure-Bot that it’ll massage my enemies to death.

I think the immersion that comes from being able to walk around MY garrison and interact with MY followers is something that’ll be even more potent than Blizz are expecting. More customisation would be welcome – but I’d be happy to have a less clunky mission UI.

I’ve been saying this for some time now: I’d love to see my alts as followers, or at least as wandering NPCs, in my garrison. And it would be even cooler if what you did on your alts had effect on their “garrison ghosts.”

I am loving the content so far. I can’t wait to see what life is like at 100 … I find it funny that I have been doing the same thing with followers. I get excited to wake up an hour early to find out if my followers were able to succeed on their missions and to send them out again. Totally addictive!

I do just have one concern

OCD + Garrison + Lots of Alts == Ouchies

I may have to give up my legions of alts lest I drive myself batcrap crazy

I have the same concern. I got my druid to 100 first, because druid travel (and 100% mount speed in cat/bear form in Nagrand? yes please!) and I thought of promoting him to my main before the xpac. Now, I can’t get past ilevel 605. I’ve been running dungeons when I haven’t been playing garrison commander, and I keep getting the same drops – no movement in my gear score… So I can’t get into heroic dungeons, can’t complete the next step of the legendary questline, etc. etc. (I know it’ll happen eventually, but it’s frustrating (and annoying) running the same dungeons over and over)

I’m thinking of going back to my MoP main, my priest… but the thought of running two garrisons is just… omg.

I do have a question, if you have one of your followers join you on your adventures, do they gain XP? I’m having a devil of a time trying to get my 90 and 91 followers xp – even on the few 3 man missions I do that can get 95-100% success rate with 2, the low level guys aren’t getting enough xp – not sure if being red in a mission lessens the amount they get or what, but I haven’t found a reliable way to get them leveled, and 90-91 level missions are getting much fewer, now that I’m getting more of my high guys to 100 and unlocking the awesome missions.

You have to watch out with the follower missions. The selection of missions you get appears to be mostly based around your highest level follower, so if you have one or two that have either leveled up fast or perhaps you recruited some of the level 98 followers when questing in Nagrand, then you’ll start seeing more missions aimed at the 96 to 98 level range. Followers with a level that shows up orange once assigned to a mission get less XP (I think maybe 50%), and followers with levels that turn red only get 10% of the mission’s XP reward. This can sometimes mean it’s OK to assign fresh 90 or 91 followers to the really high level missions since 10% of those much larger XP rewards (which you get even if you fail, the only thing you miss out on when failing is whatever the actual mission reward is) is frequently still much more than 100% of the really low level mission XP rewards. However, this requires that you have garrison resources to burn since those higher level missions cost more resources to attempt and with your low level followers failing at them, you won’t be getting resources from the few missions that might reward them.

TAILORING, BBB! I’ll have you know that I went out of my way in Talador to recruit the Pleasure-Bot 8000 so that he could work in my sweatshop, I mean tailoring emporium. There is no other possible reason for me to recruit him…it? I mean…look over there, it’s Pepe the bird!

“Oh, it’s 4:30 AM, I don’t have to start getting ready for work for another half hour… plenty of time to gather resources, collect mission results and assign Followers to new tasks. Best be quiet, don’t want to wake Cassie.”

I totally feel you on this. The real bitch of it is, though, that when I’m staying untill 11:30 or midnight, that 4:30 call is getting rough. Sleep? It’s for the weak, right?

I wasn’t sure about garrisons going in to WoD. I intentionally avoided new stuff until launch. But, yeah, I’m really enjoying the garrison and the followers. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all shakes up the economy though. I’m swimming in ores on my main, who isn’t even a miner, for example.

I could have written this post verbatim. I tried to tell my raid-mates I was going casual because I needed more time for my Garrisons (1 level 3 right now and 4 level 2). They laughed at me… but the scary thing is… I was kinda serious. I will still raid because that is what I do and there are people counting on me, but right now I pay my $15 a month for my garrison(s).